Dawn had come and gone when Maya awoke, feeling calm and collected and more relaxed than she had for a long time. For once, she had nothing urgent to attend to. Domitius was dealt with for the moment, the new champions of the Oracle had already left on their quest, and finally, finally, everything was not up to her to solve.

The world was open to her. She could go collect her magic, do her trickster quest, and attend classes like a normal person. She could do quests for herself, at her own pace. And she could go shopping at her leisure.

That made her sit up and smile. She had been so driven by individual focus any time she was out in the market district, even the one time she’d spent most of the day browsing, she had needed to save her money for … something important at the time, she couldn’t quite recall what.

Though she was getting low on funds again, she should probably make it a priority to fill out all her equipment slots. Her brief fight with Venix had made it very obvious that leaving slots empty was very detrimental to her overall combat strength.

She stretched and opened the curtains, looking out over the glittering buildings and the city stretching out toward the wall. It felt good to know where she belonged. She’d been running from place to place, thing to thing for so long. It felt surprisingly good to be settled. She could be a trickster without needing to be a nomad. Prank all day, come home to the same bed at night? She shook her head, smiling. Thankfully, the trickster class’s requirements were generally reasonable.

Speaking of class requirements, she still hadn’t checked her quest for today. She’d rolled decently well so it shouldn't be too bad.

Trickster Day 14: Craft an Uncommon weapon

Hmm, not her usual type of thing to do, but wasn’t this why Maya had decided to keep the class in the first place? It kept introducing her to areas of the game that, left to her own devices, she’d never take the time to learn?

She’d already done some tailoring, of a sort, for a previous trickster quest. Smithing couldn’t be that much different.

But nothing would get done while she stood around staring at the city.

She saved the game, since she was finally in a safe area and didn't want to lose her progress just in case she had to revert, then exited her room and headed down to the ground floor.

Maya hesitated when she stepped out onto the open ground between buildings. She glanced toward Opal Hall with its classrooms, but as eager as she was to get back to learning magic, she didn't think it would be a problem if she left the academy for a few hours first to take care of things.

She wanted to reconnect with Fire, sure, but life at 42 luck would be better for everyone than if she stayed at -8. And she had to pick up at least some of her magic from Nirsym. She was currently completely without, and it made her feel under-prepared.

Trickster quest, then magic, then classes. That felt like a reasonable itinerary for the day. She set out, planning to ask the first guard she met where she could find a smithing instructor.

“Hey! Stader? Do you have a minute?”

Maya paused and turned. A black-scaled lizardine was jogging toward her, grinning.

“I suppose. What do you need?”

“I hear you’re the one to talk to for making spells actually work? I had a great idea for a new spell! Lightning Sandwich. Standish, yeah?” He waved his arms in demonstration. “You’d make two walls of lightning that go SMOOSH and then the person inside is lightning sandwiched!”

“Um. Okay, sounds theoretically possible,” Maya hedged. “Storm Grasp does form a curved plane, if you could make two of them and align them sideways instead of always pushing out from the caster, you might be able to make it work.”

“I can’t, but you can! Right? Here are my notes.” He shoved a pile of pages into Maya’s hands. “I’ll check back with you this evening. Alright?”

“Ah, wait. I don’t think I’ll be doing anything today …”

But he was already leaving, running back the way he’d come. Maya glanced through the pages, but they were all nonsense to her in her current state of mind. He didn’t have any equations, didn’t write down anything about the casting theory behind moving the plane from an outward to an external designated manifestation point.

It was mostly full-coloured drawings of how awesome he thought a lightning sandwich would look. And pictures of himself flexing after casting it. And a novella about how cool he would be if he could cast it.

Completely useless, and childishly absurd. Maya wasn’t sure if she should laugh or pity him. He hadn’t told her his name, but he’d signed each of his drawings with the name RUNESCALE.

She really wasn’t sure how to deal with him, so for now she dropped the pages into her inventory and continued toward the academy’s exit. But apparently she’d slept longer than she’d guessed. Before she could reach the academy gates, the notification appeared that the Fire group class was about to begin.

That would be fine. She could finish her trickster quest afterward. The particular order of her to-do list didn’t matter.

When she arrived at the classroom she was glad to see so many familiar faces. Rion, Eleona, and Vey were the only people she knew from Fire group who hadn’t showed up. Today was a practical lesson on one of the team’s created spells, Flamestrike.

She’d missed the theory sessions and most of the application ones as well, they were nearing the end of the Flamestrike study.

Technically, this was the first class she’d been able to attend since joining the academy. But that didn’t seem to matter, particularly after the initial confusion over her changed appearance and the subsequent round of congratulations from those who either hadn’t been present for the celebration the night before or had joined partway through without realizing what they were celebrating for.

Fridget and Tahpa had somehow managed to turn practicing the motions into some kind of dance, which they were improvising on the spot while trying to outdo each other with their extravagant moves. Ranon grew increasingly irritated at the fact that they seemed to be progressing faster than him despite their apparent fooling around.

Maya couldn’t help noticing the group that had formed around the player whose spell she’d apparently been seen as appropriating. He sat as far away from Maya as was possible, surrounded by his new groupies, and they pointedly ignored her. None of them were people she knew, thankfully, but it still stung a little. She tried not to let it bother her, to think instead of her friends and allies. And it mostly worked. She hadn't set out to steal his spell or his glory, so what did their opinion matter?

Among the mages in general the festive attitude from the night before remained, though Maya thought she detected a background of vague worry. Though a surprising number of players had been able to reclaim mains or alts who had been imprisoned, Shardlord and several other high-level players had still not returned. James continued to claim that everything was fine and no one should worry, but his word wasn’t entirely sufficient to quell the uncertainty.

Still, for the moment, things were going well.

Maya spent several hours after the class talking to Fridget and Eleona, the latter of whom had quietly arrived midway through the lesson, and thought she had a pretty good grasp on the Flamestrike spell they were studying. It was a lot like what she’d been doing with Flame Word, actually, a flame-aligned equivalent to Magestrike. But though it was easier to create new spells based on existing ones, it was far from easy.

Maya honestly wasn’t sure she’d have ever arrived at this specific collection of motions on her own, even with the help of high luck. She had to be missing something, some deeper connection between spells. She had glimpsed the edges of it on her one max luck day, but knew that luck and instinct would only take her so far.

“Why aren’t there textbooks?” she asked at one point.

“I’ve asked the same thing,” Eleona said. “The answer generally has to do with either secrecy or ignorance. Since we run through theories regularly, there’s little enough that we actually know for certain. And what we do know for certain is generally related to specific spells. As long as we hold a monopoly on most custom spells and require actual effort to obtain them, they have value. If they were widely released, we’d lose our edge.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to have everyone working on new spells, rather than acting as gatekeepers? Then magic could be explored more thoroughly quickly.”

“I don’t think it would actually help. Anyone who’s even remotely serious about studying magic ends up here sooner or later. We have a pretty obvious presence in the city.”

“Well, that’s true,” Maya conceded. “But I feel like there should be a better way.”

“We can only do what we do.” Fridget shrugged.

“What if something happens to your teachers? What if they logged out? Would that knowledge be lost?”

“Of course not. Shardlord keeps records of every spell we know or create. If we need a new teacher for a group, he could appoint someone to take over and give them the spells for the syllabus.”

“How many spells is that?” Maya asked. “Does anyone know?”

“More than a few, less than a lot.” Eleona shrugged. “Apart from the one I discovered on my own, this is the first spell they’ve taught.”

“Is it always the same one? Or do they cycle through?”

“They cycle through,” Fridget answered. “It usually takes about a month to get through each spell, plus another week or two for remedials or latecomers. I believe there are four spells in the fire class, which comes to about 6 months for the entire course.”

“Do you teach Flame Hand, or is that supposed to be learned elsewhere?” Eleona asked. “I don’t have it yet.”

“Yes, that’s one that we teach,” Fridget said.

“Are you really just a student?” Maya asked. “You seem to know a lot more than the others.”

“Not really. Stick around, rumors are always going around. Speaking of which, I’m surprised you haven’t been inundated with people asking for help adjusting their custom spells yet.”

Maya remembered her encounter with Runescale and grimaced. “Are any of them … competent?”

“I’d assume so,” Eleona said. “If I can come up with a new spell, basically anyone can.”

“How did you manage that, by the way?” Maya asked. “The only things I’ve been able to come up with are direct combinations of existing spells.”

Eleona smiled. “I did have help. But I’d rather keep it to myself for the moment.”

“Does Shardlord know?”

She shook her head. “I created it on my own time, with my own resources. It’s entirely proprietary.”

“And you should put more effort into leveling,” Fridget said. “That shield of yours is very helpful, but it would be even more so if you weren’t a tier two we had to carry through most encounters.”

“It’s not like I have all day to play games, unlike some people,” Eleona retorted. “You may have all day, but I’m here on my lunch break. In fact, I should get going. Yikes. I didn’t realize how long we’d been talking. See you later.” A second later, Eleona vanished.

“I should get going as well,” Maya said. “Got a crafting quest to do.”

Fridget frowned. “If you haven’t done it yet, I’m sure someone else would have taken it. This zone is pretty crowded nowadays.”

“It’s a personal quest, not a public one.”

“Where do you keep finding these mysterious missions that no one has ever heard of? You’re not a roleplayer coming up with your own goals and just calling them ‘quests,’ are you?”

“No, they’re game quests. Class-related, technically.”

“You’re a crafting class? Which one?”

“No, I’m a … miscellaneous class. I get quests to do all kinds of things. PvP, dungeons, crafting, Conquest, all sorts of things.”

“Ongoing? Not one-time? What class is that and how do I get it? I’m completely tired of the same old missions day in day out. How often does that stupid little town have to get flooded before they just up and move like sensible people?”

Maya laughed. “Sorry, it’s not easy to obtain. I just got very lucky. As far as I know, Domitius is the only one to get it through normal gameplay means.”

“You figured out Domitius’s secret class? And you have it? How?!”

“Ehh, it’s a long story.”

“Then summarize.”

“I really need to get this crafting quest done ASAP. The -50 will make things so much harder until I can negate it.”

“Minus fifty what?”

“Oh, sorry.” Maya hesitated, trying to think of a cover story. Then she sighed. Maybe it was time to stop hiding. “Eh, whatever. Can you keep a secret?”

“Of course.”

“Then come with me and I’ll tell you all about it on the way.”